Congratulations to David Letterman. What an accomplishment! A rich, powerful,
famous TV personality is able to bed young, innocent, scared-for-their-jobs
gynos. He must really be proud! Bravo to Rupert Murdoch's New York Post,
who recently reported, "Dave's really got a touch of class."

To show that I'm serious about my great admiration for David Letcherman, er,
Letterman, there's an intern from Princeton named Raoul
who's down in the basement right now. As they say, if you can't get a date, get
a date with a Princeton boy! Since I need 15 minutes to
perform a Letterman on Raoul, I'm handing this off to Mike Babin, our resident
Troma writer. Thanks, Mike!

While Lloyd is busy
Tromentoring Raoul in the basement, I'm sure David Letterman would want me to
tell you about The
Sexy Box, a box-set of Troma's original genre-defining sex comedies.
Even though it's so commonplace now, mixing sex and comedy was an alien concept
in the '70s, a little like mixing Qualuudes and champagne. Troma's sex comedies
mixed slapstick humor, hot sex, and biting social satire!

The
Sexy Box, Troma's new collection of influential sex comedies, serves as
a veritable history lesson on not only the sex comedy genre, but also on the
origins of Troma itself. Lloyd Kaufman is best known for the films he
directed for Troma, but very little has been said of the films he made before
he co-founded Troma Entertainment. The
Sexy Boxsheds light on this overlooked time period by including
Kaufman's rarely seen pre-Troma films The Girl Who Returned, The
Battle of Love's Return, and the never-before-available Israeli
co-production Big Gus, What's the Fuss?, which are hidden throughout the
box set as Easter eggs.

The Girl Who Returned was Kaufman's very first film and was made when
he was majoring in Chinese studies at Yale
University. Picture young, virile
Lloyd Kaufman in college wooing young coeds with his devastatingly sexy
knowledge of the Chinese language. When he first arrived at college, he
had very little interest in film. Coming from the theater world of New
York City, Kaufman was more of a vaudevillian whose
major love was musicals, but that changed under the corrupting influence of his
roommates, who were major cinephiles. His discovery of movies set him on course
to making The Girl Who Returned, a $2,000 mostly silent black and white
feature film in which the world is composed of only two countries, Luxembourg
and Mongolia,
which are composed entirely of women and men respectively. Every four years,
Olympic games are held in order to determine the supremacy of the world.

Although Lloyd was dissatisfied
with the final product ("If

you put two monkeys in a room with movie cameras
they will make The Girl Who Returned in about twelve days."), the experience
of making it proved invaluable and taught him a thing or two about
marketing. The film played at Yale the same night as the Frank Borzage
classic Strange Cargo. What The Girl Who Returned lacked in
cinematic achievement, it made up for with a poster of a bosomy young woman
with semi-orgasmic expression on her face. Only nine people attended Strange
Cargo, while 377 went to The Girl Who Returned.

Following up The Girl Who
Returned proved to be a more difficult endeavor. During production, Kaufman
nearly burned down his neighbors' houses after improperly handling smoke bombs
during the film's battle scene. Despite this and other production setbacks, the
film received positive reviews from the press, even though Kaufman could not
afford a proper press screening. Howard Thompson from The New York Times actually
viewed the film in Kaufman's mother's house. The film is notable for a rare
acting performance from Kaufman's childhood friend and future filmmaker Oliver
Stone.

If The Girl Who Returned and The Battle of Love's Return are
overlooked stars in the Troma constellation, then Big Gus, What's the Fuss? is
a black hole that threatened to destroy the constellation entirely. Kaufman
called it "the biggest failure, monetarily and artistically, of my entire life"
and said the film "has done more damage to the Jewish people than Mein Kampf."
Big Gus was an Israeli co-production about a Hebrew detective.
Israeli producer Ami Artzi convinced Lloyd Kaufman to make the film because he
claimed that it would be a huge hit in Israel,
a country desperate for Hebrew-language films. The ensuing fiasco ended
up costing Lloyd, his partner
Michael Herz, and all of their friends and family who invested in the film
tremendous amounts of money. Despite the losses incurred from Big Gus,
Kaufman retained his desire to keep making movies and walked away with several
important lessons learned.

Big Gus, What's the Fuss? not been available in any home format until
now, along with The Girl Who Returned and The Battle of Love's Return,
as Easter eggs in The
Sexy Box.